The Lawn

What is the perfect symbol of the American dream.  You got it in one.  It’s a bountifully green lawn.

When I was four years old, we moved from an apartment in Montvale, New Jersey, into a newly built home in Nanuet, New York.  My mother, I’m sure with the help of some architectural plans one would hope, designed the house to her liking.  Needless to say, it was godawful, from a child’s perspective.  It had a basement that flooded with heavy rains. Downstairs was a claustrophobic half bath, where I would be imprisoned until I finished eating the inedible.  The kitchen, was it ever up-to-date?  Except for a paint job, it saw no renovations over the long years it was in use.  Well, almost in use. My mother never used the stove’s broiler because she didn’t want to clean it.  And there was this one kitchen drawer where she kept the family’s hairbrush and an old oatmeal box where she put slips she didn’t know what to do with.  Once when I was an adult, I came home and told her to make sure she cleaned it out before she died.  She did.

The rest of the downstairs included a formal dining room, facing both the road and the driveway, and a living room that extended the length of the house.  There was never a comfortable place to sit in that living room; and I couldn’t understand why until later, when I had my own living room to worry about.  It was because certain members of my childhood family were so heavy that furniture collapsed under their heft.  My poor mother once had my father’s favorite chair reupholstered as a surprise for him. He was so upset because it never felt comfortable again, until it once more broke down.

Upstairs there were four bedrooms.  The one I unfortunately had to share with my sister was in the front of the house, far away from the one bathroom that was down a long, dark hallway.  No nightlights, it was  totally dark at night.  I saw monsters everywhere in the shadows and was always terrified when I had to scurry down that hall in the wee hours, let’s call them.

No air conditioning but the attic had a wonderful window fan that used to cool the whole upstairs for sleeping, until the squirrels made a permanent home there and no one could figure out how to remove them.  Fortunately, I was gone by then.

The outside?  No lawn. And the lot was plenty big.

I don’t think landscapers existed in those days.  If they did, my father never hired one.  He was going to put in a lawn on his own with our help.  That was Joe and I.  Joe was five at the time, I was four.

Each year—yes, this went on for many years—he would hire a lawn roller and the work would begin.  Joe and I would be assigned to rake the soil, getting out any clumps.  Then we would disperse the seeds, after which my father would use the lawn roller to press the seeds into the earth so they could sprout.  Too bad the seeds had other ideas.

How many years did this process go on?  At this stage in my life, I have no idea.  All I know is when the grass showed no signs of growing, my father would become hysterical. Whose fault was it?  Joe’s and mine.  Screaming fits would ensure, as if we had deliberately caused the lawn to fail. 

I don’t remember when the lawn actually sprang to life.  Probably Mother Nature had heard enough emotional outburst and decided to take pity on us kids.  A full-growth lawn meant we had to stop keeping chickens, although my father did save a patch for himself where he would grow his vegetables; and of course there were the grapes that my mother would harvest and make into the most deliciously tart grape jelly each year.

Having a lawn means someone has to mow it.  That was left to my brother Joe, as it wasn’t a job for women.  We had the damn dishes.  After Joe left, my father mowed until Mike was old enough.  Mike still remembers how our father bought him a push mower because he didn’t want Mike injuring himself.  Needless to say, this gracious concern was not appreciated.

Finally, after Mike left my father bought himself a riding mower. A riding mower that broke down, much like my father’s Porsche and then his MG.  It seems everything my father bought had a habit of breaking down.  Let’s not even mention the Jeep that left my parents stranded in a Western town for over a week while a part was found and delivered.  But back to the lawn mower.  My father, temper never in check, spent hours trying to fix the damn thing until he went into the house and said, “Ruth, I think I’m having a heart attack.”

Indeed he was.  But he never gave up mowing the lawn even after Mother Nature told him to stop.

After he died, my mother finally hired a landscaping service.  When I would visit, I would look at the “lawn” and discover really there was no grass anymore, it was all weeds.  But as my mother said, “So what, it’s green.”  And I think that’s the perfect attitude to have.